What is Big Data?

Big Data is nothing, it is just a large volume of structured & unstructured data. For exmaple The data lying in the servers of your company was just data until yesterday. Suddenly, the slang Big Data got popular and now the data stored in your company is Big Data. The term covers each and every piece of data your organization has stored till now. It includes data stored in clouds and even the URLs that you bookmarked. Your company might not have digitized all the data. You may not have structured all the data already. But then, all the digital, papers, structured and non-structured data with your company is now Big Data.

“Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dwan of civilization up until 2003”, according to Schmidt(Ex CEO google). That’s something like 5 exabytes of data now.

Another large volume Data Sources for example:
– The new york stock exchange generate about 4-5 terabytes of data everyday.
– Facebook hostsmore than 240 billion photos, growing at 7 petabytes of data everyday.
– Ancestory.com, the genealogy site stores arround 10 petabytes of data everyday.
– Daily radar data of any country.

Big data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data “size” is a constantly moving target, as of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data. Big data requires a set of techniques and technologies with new forms of integration to reveal insights from datasets that are diverse, complex, and of a massive scale.

All this data can be used to get different results using different types of analysis. It is not necessary that that all analysis use all the data. Different analysis uses different parts of the BIG DATA to produce the results and predictions.